The bundle hapi-osgi-base in maven contains a copy of "slf4j-api-1.6.6.jar", and the MANIFEST.MF forces its use, instead of using the maven dependency (this bundle depends on hapi-base, which depends on slf4j-api).
This is causing problems when the application that is using hapi-osgi-bundle also depends on slf4j-api for its own things, the ClassLoader finds two different libraries with the same name and version and it throws an error.
The solution is to remove this jar file, and modify the MANIFEST.MF and the pom.xml file to reflect this (I'm not sure about the pom, though). We have done this in our own maven repository and it's working.
The exclusion still referred to log4j which is not directly used anymore. fixed to exclude slf4j-api